The Yummy Mummy’s Family Handbook. Liz Fraser

      

Hey—go easy on the lard! Every time you add butter to your family’s food, be it on a jacket potato, melted on top of peas or in the kids’ packed lunch, ask yourself: could I use a little less? Am I using the right kind of fat? Using olive or light spreads is much healthier than dolloping on blobs of unsaturated fat. That was OK in 1970, but we are a little wiser now to the importance of low fat and ‘good’ fats and oils.

      

What they don’t have, they won’t miss. If you only ever drink water, your whole family will get used to only drinking water, and there will be no fights about juices, squashes and so on: you don’t drink them. Period. It’s the same with all ‘bad’ foods: if you never have them, nobody knows they’re missing anything and they just get used to eating well. Of course they’ll come across them at some stage outside the home, and having them as a treat is fine, but if the habit at home is for healthy stuff then that’s what’s ‘the norm’.

      TOP TIP: Smoothies. We’ve all tried serving less-than-perfect fruit to our kids, only to be met with looks of disgust and shrieks of horror. One technique is to insist they eat it and learn that this is what fruit is supposed to look like. The other is to chuck it in a blender with some ice cubes or milk and serve up a fruit smoothie deluxe. They don’t know what’s in it, you’ve wasted nothing and your kids think you’re Mary Poppins—success!

      Hopefully some of this has convinced you that you are not alone in finding the kitchen to be somewhat fraught at times, that there are things you can do to make it a happier place and that you will be able to cook something resembling a decent meal without too much fuss. With this newfound confidence and culinary nous let’s move through into the dining room, and tuck in.

       PART EIGHT The Dining Room

      Most houses have what estate agents would call a ‘dining room’, and what you or I would probably call a God-awful mess. The very word ‘dining’ implies an activity long-since abandoned in favour of snacking, grazing, picking and shovelling, and most of this ingesting occurs either in the kitchen, on a sofa or in a supermarket queue when we can’t wait any longer. But with a little luck and some determination, we can revert that lost room full of children’s toys, AA manuals and un-ironed shirts back into something used for dining. In the meantime…

      Feeding time at the Zoo: The importance of family mealtimes

      Once upon a time (a time that is very hard to pinpoint precisely but which occurred somewhere between the invention of tables and chairs and the emergence of the sixty-hour working week) many families in England ate their meals together: breakfast, lunch and dinner. Together.

      And these days? Well, it’s a brow-wrinklingly sad and shocking fact that an estimated twenty per cent of families in this country eat together once a week or less. Once a week? That’s so awful and depressing that it makes you want to bang your head against the microwave before reaching for the frozen peas and feeling like an idiot with a swollen forehead. By looking at the way most people I know live and work, I assume that the other eighty per cent of families, while managing slightly more than the unimpressive ‘once a week’, are probably not eating together more than ten times per week or so, which is still lamentably seldom.

      Of course, we all live insanely busy, stressful lives, and to propose that everyone should be home from work by six o’clock every evening to sit together around a large table, laughing merrily and devouring a delicious pot roast, is as ridiculous as suggesting we all stop worrying about our weight or remember to go to bed before our eyes go dry and we fall asleep in front of Green Wing. It just ain’t gonna happen. What can happen is that we make much more of an effort to sit down as often as possible for meals as a family, and that we try to make it enjoyable. Yes, you were pissed off this morning because somebody put their muddy trainers on top of your new white bag, which is now marked and ruined, but now is not the time to bring it up.

       OK—how exactly is this supposed to happen, when neither of us gets in from work or after-school clubs until 7 p.m., I work shifts and often leave before the kids are even up, and breakfast, if it happens, is whatever anyone can find and make edible during the mad rush to get out of the door to school and work, huh?

      It’s a good point, and probably applies to thousands of families up and down the country, but there are ways of eating more meals together, if you are prepared to make some changes and forgo the odd cappuccino and muffin in Costa in favour of Rice Crispies and chaos at home.

      

Find the time. It’s there. I promise you, if you really, really look, you will find the time to eat together more often. See p. 159 for ways of doing this.

      

Make changes. If you have looked properly, and I mean properly, which includes your twenty-minute make-up sessions, his frequent after-work drinks, and your children’s mind-bendingly slow getting-out-of-bed procedure, and you still cannot find any wasted time that could be allotted to the ‘eating a meal together’ section of the day, then you need to make serious changes. Maybe he needs to go to work earlier to come home for dinner with you all. Maybe you need to get your kids up ten minutes earlier to have the time for breakfast together. Maybe you need to be happy to wait until 7.30 p.m. to have dinner as a family. Something will have to give, or move, or change.

      

Weekend wonders. If you are lucky enough not to have to work at the weekend, then being able to eat together at least six times a week shouldn’t be beyond you. If you are unlucky enough to be working on the weekend, then see if there isn’t something you could do about this.

      

Sunday lunch. Making Sunday lunch (or Saturday, if that’s the only day that works for your family) a ritual event where you all eat together in an unrushed way, while talking and laughing, can have a very positive effect on the whole family. Try it for a couple of weeks and see if it can become a habit.

      

Prioritise. Most of the above points involve prioritisation. If, for you, being a family and putting in the work required to keep this chaotic unit together is worth a lot, then you will have to lower the priority of, say, meeting your friends for a drink three nights a week, or going for a run at breakfast-time. Nobody would suggest you need to forgo every evening out or earlymorning jog, but sometimes it’s worth a quick, ‘Do I really need to do that, or could I be at home now with my family, and do it some other time?’

      

Enjoy mealtimes. When I say eating together as a family, I mean ‘in a fun, noisy, relaxed, laughter-filled way’, not like a scene out of a pre-war boarding school. Think Dolmio adverts and you’re on the right lines. Mealtimes should be fun, not frightening.

      Bums on Seats: Table manners and other essentials

      I am a huge stickler for manners. This is almost certainly the result of both of my parents carrying the Stickler for Manners gene, which showed itself by them making me say my pleases, and thank yous and, horror of horrors, insisting I make eye contact when greeting guests. The older I get the more of a stickler I am becoming: I am now almost obsessive about instilling some decent manners in my own flock of